The Truths About Homeschool “Failures” No One Tells You
I clicked on the email as I read, The Homeschool Mom Who Thought She Failed - Until She Didn’t. As a homeschool mom myself, I struggle with the feeling of failure on a regular basis - Am I doing enough? Did we miss something? Are my kids learning enough?
What I read resonated. In fact I wished I’d written it myself! I needed this reminder; and from what I hear I’m not the only one. Thankfully, the author is a business buddy of mine, so I reached out to ask her about sharing this information with you.
Lisa was gracious enough to say yes. Even better, she turned the email content into a full article for me to post here just for you!! I hope as you read these words that your homeschool mama heart is able to take a deep breath and relax a little bit like mine did.
And, after you finish reading, check out the free advance-access companion piece she is offering at the bottom of this page!
The Homeschool Mom Who Thought She’d Failed - Until She Didn’t
“I can’t believe how I’ve failed my daughter!” a homeschool friend wailed. “I just discovered that Katie, my 9-year-old, doesn’t know how to tell time. How could I be such a terrible homeschool mom and not have realized that?” She was absolutely distraught, convinced she’d failed as a homeschool mom, when she learned she’d been using a math curriculum that didn’t cover telling time with analog clocks.
If you've ever felt this crushing sense of mom guilt, you're not alone - but here's what happened next. After she calmed down, she grabbed a clock, sat with Katie, explained the big and little hands, and within five minutes, her daughter was telling time.
What I love so much about this experience is the shift in perspective it caused. Because of it, I gained insight into three homeschool realities that no one seems to talk about. Here's what I learned to embrace while homeschooling my three sons.
Because you are reading this blog, I know you are likely in the thick of it - juggling young children, never getting enough sleep, navigating your way through an endless sea of curriculum choices, and wondering a lot if you are failing your kids.
As a veteran homeschool mom, I have some truths that on the surface might not sound comforting, but I promise, they’re worth hearing…
#1 Your children will have learning gaps.
You are going to miss teaching something crucial. And of what you do teach, your children are not going to grasp some important concepts.
It’s impossible for someone to learn everything they are taught. It’s something all learners share, and researchers have explored why. When I first came across Dr. Edgar Dale’s Cone of Experience, it helped me put my own expectations into perspective. His graphic illustrates the differences in retention based on method.
Dale demonstrated in his research that active application is more likely to produce high retention and strong learning results over more passive forms of learning such as listening to a lecture or reading a book. In other words, your kids won’t retain everything, especially the material we teach through more passive methods.
Guess what, though? Neither do public school kids or the seemingly model family at your local co-op; so, when you are worried about missed concepts, try to keep it in perspective.
Adaptation of Edgar Dale’s Cone of Experience
This diagram shows how retention tends to increase as one moves from passive, abstract forms of learning to more direct, hands-on involvement.
Note: The takeaway here is that more active learning experiences are more likely to have good retention rates...and there is a lot of information your kids simply won’t retain – and that’s perfectly normal and fine.
Image Credit: Lisa Tussey
#2 You will mess up.
You will get some things wrong. Your children will struggle to learn certain things.
The key is what your child does when they bump up against something they need that they missed – like understanding how we tell time or the rules of operations between negative and positive integers when they are encountering algebraic equations. What helped me most was focusing less on what my boys were learning and more on how they learned. The skills of learning to learn prepared them better than any specific lesson ever could.
You might be wondering, “What does learning to learn even mean?” It means that children are nurtured to expect to not know things instead of being embarrassed they don’t know something. In our house, that meant encouraging curiosity, asking questions, looking for good resources, and not being afraid to admit when we didn’t know something. I strove to model that for my children, making it part of our family’s daily life.
I learned to reframe anything that didn’t work out, from cookie recipes to math lessons, as simply learning. When I made that shift, my sons began doing it too. We tried to avoid the language and framing of failure. When we are learning, we make mistakes, gather data, ask questions, and try again. Failure has a connotation as an end result. With a failure mindset you get: I tried. I failed. I give up.
We can set children up for success by helping them be comfortable with not succeeding the first try – or second or third or more. What worked best for us was rewarding effort, not just results. We started celebrating struggles as signs that learning was happening.
#3 Your timing will be off.
Maybe it will be using a reading curriculum that doesn't meet your child's readiness level. Or it feels impossible to fit art into your schedule - you want to include it, but it keeps falling through the cracks. Timing can be tricky. I am still a little heartbroken over the experience my youngest had with math when he entered college.
Exploring the single-sided geometry of the Möbius Ship at Newfields Art Museum in Indianapolis, Indiana, U.S.A.
Photo credit: Lisa Tussey
Because we stayed with key concepts until our sons grasped them before moving on, they advanced subjects quickly. They entered high school math in junior high school. By 10th grade, they’d finished their traditional math requirements, so we moved into exploring how math shows up in the real world with patterns like the Fibonacci sequence and the Möbius strip. It was fun and hands-on, but it also meant they weren’t doing much math by hand anymore. At the time, I didn’t think much of it; it just felt like a natural next step. But I hadn’t realized how that choice would come back around later.
So, when my youngest was given a type of placement test his first day in his college freshman math class, he totally bombed the section on long division that had to be done by hand. He was really upset that I’d “never taught him long division.” He had no memory of it - retention: zero. I had of course taught it to him, and he’d mastered it – but that was in 2nd grade, and he probably hadn’t done it by hand since 7th grade.
Sometimes you’ll have taught something so early that by the time your child needs it again, it’s long forgotten, and that can present a challenge. I knew several highly intelligent college students who had to take remedial math and English courses their freshman year because they’d simply forgotten the basics like grammar rules and long division by hand. Other times, you might be later than usual teaching something like telling time.
It’s all good. As long as they know how to learn, they’ll just get at it. That’s what my son did; with a few minutes of refresher, he was back on track.
My friend’s situation with telling time made me realize that while sometimes it’s important to master a concept before moving on, other things just aren’t as important as they feel. I learned that we could spend hours introducing time-telling in kindergarten, filling out worksheets in first grade, more worksheets in second grade, and ensuring mastery in third grade, or I could wait until the child was older or had a need to tell time and spend five minutes on it.
It’s helpful to know which subjects and concepts are vital and which can wait, but even when you get that wrong, you’ll still be fine as long as your children know how to learn.
Next Steps
The next time you encounter a learning challenge with your children, take a breath and ask how important this learning piece is in the grand scheme of things. Consider if there is a different perspective you can use. Is this about the concept needing to be mastered right now or is it something that can wait? Is there another way to approach it? What happens if your child enters adulthood without this?
Instead of stressing about it, feel secure in the fact that your children are going to have gaps in their learning, you’ll mess up, and your timing will be off sometimes. But all that is not only normal, it’s going to be okay, because you are guiding them to know they can tackle whatever comes their way - and find success through trying. And maybe, like my friend’s daughter, your child’s “gaps” will turn out not to be failures at all but reminders that learning happens best when we’re ready for it.
You’ve got this, and so do they because the real success story isn’t perfect lessons - it’s kids and parents who keep learning, together.
5 Responses for Learning Challenges
Advanced Access for TTM Readers!!
Receive exclusive, advance access to the companion piece to this blog, Going From I Can't to I Can Learn: 5 Responses for When Your Child Hits a Learning Wall, when you subscribe to her Connected Course Designs newsletter.
